Mark Mori had 20,000 photographs of the 1950s' most famous pinup model to pick from when he made his documentary, "Bettie Page Reveals All." But when he tried to film Page a few years before her death in 2008, she refused.

Instead, Mori tape-recorded hours of interviews with Page after he tracked her down in 1996 at a halfway house in the Los Angeles suburbs, shortly after she'd been released from a mental institution. Mori recalls, "Bettie's face was fuller, she was heavier and she still had the bangs, though they were graying. She was in her 70s and I thought she looked great."

The documentary encompasses Page's early days in San Francisco, where she was arrested for assaulting her landlord. Page moved on to become a mid-century sensation through her much-imitated bikini-clad poses. Hounded by lawmakers and politicians, Page quit modeling in 1957. Broken marriages, born-again Christianity and bouts of mental illness followed.

"Bettie had as great a survivor instinct as anybody I've ever met," says Mori. "She would laugh at the idea that she was exploited. She had so much joy and did what she wanted to do. I think part of Bettie's appeal for women is that there was a complete lack of any victim mentality to what she did."

Mori, who realized he could utilize Page's voice off-camera after seeing Robert Evans' off-camera narration in the "Kid Stays in the Picture" documentary, notes, "All during the time I contemplated making this film, Bettie Page just kept getting bigger and bigger. Beyoncé came out with this music video which clearly imitates Bettie's little movies, and Katy Perry popped up on the scene."

Page ranks with Andy Warhol and George Harrison as one of the top 10 posthumous celebrity earners and continues to make a mark among pop culture connoisseurs. Mori says, "For all these people in outsider subcultures - tattoo, comic book, gay, rockabilly, fetishists - Bettie Page is like their patron saint."

Another Hole in the Head has local stamp

Bay Area filmmakers get into the bloody act for this year's Another Hole in the Head Film Festival with movies that will be screened at the New People Cinema. "Struggled Reagans" (Dec. 11), filmed in the Mission District by director Gregg Golding, chronicles freaky encounters between six young people, a robot and a Hindu god.

In Pacifica filmmaker Sean Cain's "Jurassic Block" (Dec. 14), three sorority girls wake up in a drunk tank only to find dinosaurs on the loose. And "Senn" (Dec. 19), from San Francisco director Josh Feldman, imagines what happens when a factory worker from another planet travels to encounter a mysterious object.

'Nebraska': The grueling life of a screenwriter

Four years before screenwriter Bob Nelson got his script for "Nebraska" off the ground, he went to work at Pixar. What was the script development process like?

He says, "I guess you'd call it painstaking, which includes both the good and bad part of that word."

Hired in 2008 to write the now-canceled "Newt," Nelson remembers spending weeks trying to perfect a single scene. "I'd go through the scene with the director, then sit around with storyboard artists," he says. "They'd come up with a rough storyboard. You take that into the auditorium, and the Pixar brain trust, led by John Lasseter, comes in to watch it. Immediately afterward, you go into this big room. It's not just people sitting at the big table; there's people around the people at the table, standing along the wall. That's where you get the immediate feedback."

Nelson moved with his wife from Washington state to North Beach during his stint at the Emeryville studio.

"She had a great time while I was there pulling my hair out," Nelson says, laughing. "I rewrote 'Nebraska' probably 50 times before I put it out.

"But after working at Pixar, I realize I'm nowhere close to what they do on their scripts. They're very meticulous." {sbox}